Covid-19 Update

Baroness Bull Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bull (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register. With the move to stage 3 of the road map, university students can now return to campus. Most of them are too young to have received vaccines so students around the country will form a significant cohort of young people undertaking regular and frequent testing as a matter of course. What consideration has been given to the benefits of sustaining PCR testing and sequencing at scale in universities as a way of rapidly identifying and understanding new variants? Will the Government consider providing funding to support that in future?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the vice-chancellors and to the universities and colleges of Britain for the way in which they have embraced campus testing. It has been a salutary lesson in what can be done, and it has helped to keep infection rates down on campuses where there has been a small number of returning students to date. That is done mainly through LFD testing. Positive tests then have a complementary PCR test, and the PCR test is automatically sequenced if it is positive. The combination of LFD, PCR and sequencing is the right one for keeping infection rates down, but we tweak the formula as and when best advice comes in.